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Is Shakespeare Dead?
By
Mark Twain
Contents
CHAPTER
VIII--Shakespeare as a Lawyer {2}.
CHAPTER
X--The Rest of the Equipment
Scattered here and there through the sta=
cks of
unpublished manuscript which constitute this formidable Autobiography and D=
iary
of mine, certain chapters will in some distant future be found which deal w=
ith "Claimants"--claimants
historically notorious: Satan, Claimant; the Golden Calf, Claimant; the Vei=
led
Prophet of Khorassan, Claimant; Louis XVII., Claimant; William Shakespeare,
Claimant; Arthur Orton, Claimant; Mary Baker G. Eddy, Claimant--and the res=
t of
them. Eminent Claimants, successfu=
l Claimants,
defeated Claimants, royal Claimants, pleb Claimants, showy Claimants, shabby
Claimants, revered Claimants, despised Claimants, twinkle starlike here and
there and yonder through the mists of history and legend and tradition--and=
oh,
all the darling tribe are clothed in mystery and romance, and we read about
them with deep interest and discuss them with loving sympathy or with ranco=
rous
resentment, according to which side we hitch ourselves to. It has always been so with the human
race. There was never a Claimant t=
hat
couldn't get a hearing, nor one that couldn't accumulate a rapturous follow=
ing,
no matter how flimsy and apparently unauthentic his claim might be. Arthur Orton's claim that he was the lo=
st
Tichborne baronet come to life again was as flimsy as Mrs. Eddy's that she
wrote Science and Health from the direct dictation of the Deity; =
yet in
England near forty years ago Orton had a huge army of devotees and incorrig=
ible
adherents, many of whom remained stubbornly unconvinced after their fat god=
had
been proven an impostor and jailed as a perjurer, and to-day Mrs. Eddy's
following is not only immense, but is daily augmenting in numbers and
enthusiasm. Orton had many fine and educated minds among his adherents, Mrs.
Eddy has had the like among hers from the beginning. Her church is as well equipped in those
particulars as is any other church.
Claimants can always count upon a following, it doesn't matter who t=
hey
are, nor what they claim, nor whether they come with documents or without.<=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> It was always so. Down out of the long-vanished past, acr=
oss
the abyss of the ages, if you listen you can still hear the believing
multitudes shouting for Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.
A
friend has sent me a new book, from England-- The Shakespeare Problem Resta=
ted --well
restated and closely reasoned; and my fifty years' interest in that
matter--asleep for the last three years--is excited once more. It is an interest which was born of Del=
ia
Bacon's book--away back in that ancient day--1857, or maybe 1856. About a year later my pilot-master, Bix=
by,
transferred me from his own steamboat to the Pennsylvania , and placed me under the o=
rders
and instructions of George Ealer--dead now, these many, many years. I steered for him a good many months--a=
s was
the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice: stood a daylight watch and spun the
wheel under the severe superintendence and correction of the master. He was a prime chess player and an idol=
ater
of Shakespeare. He would play ches=
s with
anybody; even with me, and it cost his official dignity something to do
that. Also--quite uninvited--he wo=
uld
read Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it was his
watch, and I was steering. He read=
well,
but not profitably for me, because he constantly injected commands into the
text. That broke it all up, mixed =
it all
up, tangled it all up--to that degree, in fact, that if we were in a risky =
and
difficult piece of river an ignorant person couldn't have told, sometimes,
which observations were Shakespeare's and which were Ealer's. For instance:
What man dare, I dare!
Approach thou what are you laying in the leads for? what a =
hell
of an idea! like the rugged eas=
e her
off a little, ease her off! rugged Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or=
the there she goes! meet her, meet her! didn't you know she'd smell the reef if you crowded it <=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> like that?
Hyrcan tiger; take any shape but that and my firm nerves she'll be in the woods the first you know! stop the starboard! =
come ahead
strong on the larboard! back the starboard! . . . Now then, you're all right; come ahead on the
starboard; straighten up and go 'long, never tremble: or be alive aga=
in,
and dare me to the desert damna=
tion
can't you keep away from that greasy water? pull her down! snatch her! snatch her baldheaded! wi=
th thy
sword; if trembling I inhabit t=
hen,
lay in the leads!--no, only the starboard one, leave the other alone, protest me the baby =
of a
girl. Hence horrible shadow! eight bells--that watchman's =
asleep
again, I reckon, go down and ca=
ll
Brown yourself, unreal mockery, hence!
He
certainly was a good reader, and splendidly thrilling and stormy and tragic,
but it was a damage to me, because I have never since been able to read
Shakespeare in a calm and sane way. I
cannot rid it of his explosive interlardings, they break in everywhere with
their irrelevant "What in hell are you up to now ! pull her down! more! more !--there now, steady as you go,&quo=
t; and
the other disorganizing interruptions that were always leaping from his
mouth. When I read Shakespeare now=
, I
can hear them as plainly as I did in that long-departed time--fifty-one yea=
rs ago. I never regarded Ealer's readings as
educational. Indeed they were a
detriment to me.
His
contributions to the text seldom improved it, but barring that detail he wa=
s a
good reader, I can say that much for him.
He did not use the book, and did not need to; he knew his Shakespear=
e as
well as Euclid ever knew his multiplication table.
Did he
have something to say--this Shakespeare-adoring Mississippi pilot--anent De=
lia
Bacon's book? Yes. And he said it; said it all the time, f=
or
months--in the morning watch, the middle watch, the dog watch; and probably
kept it going in his sleep. He bou=
ght
the literature of the dispute as fast as it appeared, and we discussed it a=
ll
through thirteen hundred miles of river four times traversed in every
thirty-five days--the time required by that swift boat to achieve two round
trips. We discussed, and discussed, and discussed, and disputed and disputed
and disputed; at any rate he did, and I got in a word now and then when he =
slipped
a cog and there was a vacancy. He =
did
his arguing with heat, with energy, with violence; and I did mine with the
reserve and moderation of a subordinate who does not like to be flung out o=
f a pilot-house
that is perched forty feet above the water.
He was fiercely loyal to Shakespeare and cordially scornful of Bacon=
and
of all the pretensions of the Baconians.
So was I--at first. And at =
first
he was glad that that was my attitude.
There were even indications that he admired it; indications dimmed, =
it
is true, by the distance that lay between the lofty boss-pilotical altitude=
and
my lowly one, yet perceptible to me; perceptible, and translatable into a c=
ompliment--compliment
coming down from above the snow-line and not well thawed in the transit, and
not likely to set anything afire, not even a cub-pilot's self-conceit; stil=
l a
detectable compliment, and precious.
Naturally
it flattered me into being more loyal to Shakespeare--if possible--than I w=
as
before, and more prejudiced against Bacon--if possible than I was before. And so we discussed and discussed, both=
on the
same side, and were happy. For a
while. Only for a while. Only for a very little while, a very, v=
ery,
very little while. Then the atmosp=
here
began to change; began to cool off.
A brighter person would have seen what the trouble was, earlier than I did, perhaps, but I saw it early enough for all practical purposes. You see, he was of an argumentative disposition. Therefore it took him= but a little time to get tired of arguing with a person who agreed with everythin= g he said and consequently never furnished him a provocative to flare up and show what he could do when it came to clear, cold, hard, rose-cut, hundred-facet= ed, diamond-flashing reasoning. That w= as his name for it. It has been applied s= ince, with complacency, as many as several times, in the Bacon-Shakespeare scuffle. On the Shakespeare side.<= o:p>
Then
the thing happened which has happened to more persons than to me when princ=
iple
and personal interest found themselves in opposition to each other and a ch=
oice
had to be made: I let principle go, and went over to the other side. Not the entire way, but far enough to a=
nswer
the requirements of the case. That=
is to
say, I took this attitude, to wit: I only believed Bacon wrote Shakespeare, whereas I knew Shakespeare didn't. Ealer was satisfied with that, and the =
war
broke loose. Study, practice, expe=
rience
in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me to take my new positi=
on
almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly seriously; a little later sti=
ll,
lovingly, gratefully, devotedly; finally: fiercely, rabidly,
uncompromisingly. After that, I was
welded to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die for it, and I looked d=
own with
compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody else's faith that didn't
tally with mine. That faith, impos=
ed
upon me by self-interest in that ancient day, remains my faith to-day, and =
in
it I find comfort, solace, peace, and never-failing joy. You see how curiously theological it is=
. The "rice Christian" of the O=
rient
goes through the very same steps, when he is after rice and the missionary =
is
after him ; he goes for rice, and
remains to worship.
Ealer
did a lot of our "reasoning"--not to say substantially all of it.=
The
slaves of his cult have a passion for calling it by that large name. We oth=
ers
do not call our inductions and deductions and reductions by any name at
all. They show for themselves, wha=
t they
are, and we can with tranquil confidence leave the world to ennoble them wi=
th a
title of its own choosing.
Now
and then when Ealer had to stop to cough, I pulled my induction-talents
together and hove the controversial lead myself: always getting eight feet,
eight-and-a-half, often nine, sometimes even quarter-less-twain--as I believed; but always "no bottom,&qu=
ot; as
he said.
I got
the best of him only once. I prepa=
red
myself. I wrote out a passage from
Shakespeare--it may have been the very one I quoted a while ago, I don't
remember--and riddled it with his wild steamboatful interlardings. When an unrisky opportunity offered, one
lovely summer day, when we had sounded and buoyed a tangled patch of crossi=
ngs
known as Hell's Half Acre, and were aboard again and he had sneaked the Pen=
nsylvania
triumphantly through it without once scraping sand, and the A. T. Lacey had followed in our wake and got stuck, =
and he
was feeling good, I showed it to him. It
amused him. I asked him to fire it=
off: read
it; read it, I diplomatically added, as only he could read dramatic poetry.=
The compliment touched him where he
lived. He did read it; read it with
surpassing fire and spirit; read it as it will never be read again; for
I
waited a week, to let the incident fade; waited longer; waited until he bro=
ught
up for reasonings and vituperation my pet position, my pet argument, the one
which I was fondest of, the one which I prized far above all others in my
ammunition-wagon, to wit: that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespear=
e's
works, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar =
with
the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk, and
lawyer-ways--and if Shakespeare was possessed of the infinitely-divided
star-dust that constituted this vast wealth, how did he get it, and where , and when ?
"From
books."
From
books! That was always the idea. I answered as my readings of the champi=
ons of
my side of the great controversy had taught me to answer: that a man can't
handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he has not personall=
y served. He will make mistakes; he will not, and=
cannot,
get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right; and the moment he depa=
rts,
by even a shade, from a common trade-form, the reader who has served that t=
rade
will know the writer hasn't . Ealer would not be convinced; he said a=
man
could learn how to correctly handle the subtleties and mysteries and
free-masonries of any trade by careful reading and studying. But when I got him to read again the pa=
ssage
from Shakespeare with the interlardings, he perceived, himself, that books
couldn't teach a student a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thorou=
ghly
and perfectly that he could talk them off in book and play or conversation =
and
make no mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover. It was a triumph for me. He was silent awhile, and I knew what w=
as
happening: he was losing his temper. And
I knew he would presently close the session with the same old argument that=
was
always his stay and his support in time of need; the same old argument, the=
one
I couldn't answer--because I dasn't: the argument that I was an ass, and be=
tter
shut up. He delivered it, and I ob=
eyed.
Oh,
dear, how long ago it was--how pathetically long ago! And here am I, old, forsaken, forlorn a=
nd
alone, arranging to get that argument out of somebody again.
When a
man has a passion for Shakespeare, it goes without saying that he keeps com=
pany
with other standard authors. Ealer
always had several high-class books in the pilot-house, and he read the same
ones over and over again, and did not care to change to newer and fresher
ones. He played well on the flute,=
and
greatly enjoyed hearing himself play. So
did I. He had a notion that a flute
would keep its health better if you took it apart when it was not standing a
watch; and so, when it was not on duty it took its rest, disjointed, on the
compass-shelf under the breast-board.
When the Pennsylvania blew up and became a drifting rack-heap
freighted with wounded and dying poor souls (my young brother Henry among
them), pilot Brown had the watch below, and was probably asleep and never k=
new
what killed him; but Ealer escaped unhurt.
He and his pilot-house were shot up into the air; then they fell, and
Ealer sank through the ragged cavern where the hurricane deck and the boiler
deck had been, and landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck, on top of on=
e of
the unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog of scalding and deadly
steam. But not for long. He did not lose his head: long familiar=
ity
with danger had taught him to keep it, in any and all emergencies. He held his coat-lappels to his nose wi=
th one
hand, to keep out the steam, and scrabbled around with the other till he fo=
und
the joints of his flute, then he is took measures to save himself alive, an=
d was
successful. I was not on board.
When I was a Sunday-school scholar somet=
hing
more than sixty years ago, I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find=
out
all I could about him. I began to ask questions, but my class-teacher, Mr.
Barclay the stone-mason, was reluctant about answering them, it seemed to
me. I was anxious to be praised for
turning my thoughts to serious subjects when there wasn't another boy in the
village who could be hired to do such a thing.
I was greatly interested in the incident of Eve and the serpent, and
thought Eve's calmness was perfectly noble.
I asked Mr. Barclay if he had ever heard of another woman who, being
approached by a serpent, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest
timber. He did not answer my quest=
ion,
but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age and comprehension. I will say for Mr. Barclay that he was
willing to tell me the facts of Satan's history, but he stopped there: he
wouldn't allow any discussion of them.
In the
course of time we exhausted the facts.
There were only five or six of them, you could set them all down on a
visiting-card. I was disappointed.=
I had been meditating a biography, and =
was
grieved to find that there were no materials.
I said as much, with the tears running down. Mr. Barclay's sympathy and compassion w=
ere
aroused, for he was a most kind and gentle-spirited man, and he patted me on
the head and cheered me up by saying there was a whole vast ocean of
materials! I can still feel the ha=
ppy
thrill which these blessed words shot through me.
Then
he began to bail out that ocean's riches for my encouragement and joy. Like this: it was
"conjectured"--though not established--that Satan was originally =
an
angel in heaven; that he fell; that he rebelled, and brought on a war; that=
he
was defeated, and banished to perdition.
Also, "we have reason to believe" that later he did so-and=
-so;
that "we are warranted in supposing" that at a subsequent time he
travelled extensively, seeking whom he might devour; that a couple of centu=
ries
afterward, "as tradition instructs us," he took up the cruel trad=
e of
tempting people to their ruin, with vast and fearful results; that by-and-b=
y,
"as the probabilities seem to indicate," he may have done certain
things, he might have done certain other things, he must have done still ot=
her
things.
And so
on and so on. We set down the five=
known
facts by themselves, on a piece of paper, and numbered it "page 1"=
;;
then on fifteen hundred other pieces of paper we set down the
"conjectures," and "suppositions," and "maybes,&qu=
ot;
and "perhapses," and "doubtlesses," and "rumors,&q=
uot;
and "guesses," and "probabilities," and
"likelihoods," and "we are permitted to thinks," and
"we are warranted in believings," and "might have beens,&quo=
t; and
"could have beens," and "must have beens," and
"unquestionablys," and "without a shadow of doubts"--and
behold!
Materials ?
Why, we had enough to build a biography of Shakespeare!
Yet he
made me put away my pen; he would not let me write the history of Satan.
I
assured him, in earnest and sincere words, that he had wholly misconceived =
my
attitude; that I had the highest respect for Satan, and that my reverence f=
or
him equalled, and possibly even exceeded, that of any member of any
church. I said it wounded me deepl=
y to
perceive by his words that he thought I would make fun of Satan, and deride
him, laugh at him, scoff at him: whereas in truth I had never thought of su=
ch a
thing, but had only a warm desire to make fun of those others and laugh at =
them .
"What others?"
"Why, the Supposers, the Perhapsers, the Might-Have-Beeners, the
Could-Have-Beeners, the Must-Have-Beeners, the Without-a-Shadow-of-Doubters,
the We-are-Warranted-in-Believingers, and all that funny crop of solemn
architects who have taken a good solid foundation of five indisputable and
unimportant facts and built upon it a Conjectural Satan thirty miles
high."
What
did Mr. Barclay do then? Was he
disarmed? Was he silenced? No. He was shocked. He was so shocked that he visibly
shuddered. He said the Satanic
Traditioners and Perhapsers and Conjecturers were themselves sacred!
As sacred as their work. So
sacred that whoso ventured to mock them or make fun of their work, could not
afterward enter any respectable house, even by the back door.
How
true were his words, and how wise! How fortunate
it would have been for me if I had heeded them.
But I was young, I was but seven years of age, and vain, foolish, and
anxious to attract attention. I wr=
ote
the biography, and have never been in a respectable house since.
How curious and interesting is the
parallel--as far as poverty of biographical details is concerned--between S=
atan
and Shakespeare. It is wonderful, =
it is
unique, it stands quite alone, there is nothing resembling it in history,
nothing resembling it in romance, nothing approaching it even in
tradition. How sublime is their
position, and how over-topping, how sky-reaching, how supreme--the two Great
Unknowns, the two Illustrious Conjecturabilities! They are the best-known unknown persons=
that
have ever drawn breath upon the planet.
For
the instruction of the ignorant I will make a list, now, of those details of
Shakespeare's history which are fa=
cts --verified
facts, established facts, undisputed facts.
FACTS
He was born on the 23d of April, 1564.
Of
good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write, could not si=
gn
their names.
At
Stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was shabby and unclean,
and densely illiterate. Of the nin=
eteen
important men charged with the government of the town, thirteen had to
"make their mark" in attesting important documents, because they
could not write their names.
Of the
first eighteen years of his life n=
othing
is known. They are a blank.
On the
27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare took out a license to marry Anne
Whateley.
Next
day William Shakespeare took out a license to marry Anne Hathaway. She was
eight years his senior.
William
Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. In a
hurry. By grace of a reluctantly-g=
ranted
dispensation there was but one publication of the banns.
Within
six months the first child was born.
About
two (blank) years followed, during which period nothing at all happened to Shakespeare ,=
so
far as anybody knows.
Then
came twins--1585. February.
Two
blank years follow.
Then--1587--he
makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family behind.
Five
blank years follow. During this pe=
riod nothing happened to him , as far as anyb=
ody
actually knows.
Then--1592--there
is mention of him as an actor.
Next
year--1593--his name appears in the official list of players.
Next
year--1594--he played before the queen.
A detail of no consequence: other obscurities did it every year of t=
he
forty-five of her reign. And remai=
ned
obscure.
Three
pretty full years follow. Full of
play-acting. Then
In
1597 he bought New Place, Stratford.
Thirteen
or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he accumulated money, and also
reputation as actor and manager.
Meantime
his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become associated with a numbe=
r of
great plays and poems, as (ostensibly) author of the same.
Some
of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made no protest. Then--1610-11--he returned to Stratford=
and
settled down for good and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading=
in
tithes, trading in land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one shillings,=
borrowed
by his wife during his long desertion of his family; suing debtors for
shillings and coppers; being sued himself for shillings and coppers; and ac=
ting
as confederate to a neighbor who tried to rob the town of its rights in a
certain common, and did not succeed.
He
lived five or six years--till 1616--in the joy of these elevated pursuits.<=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> Then he made a will, and signed each of=
its
three pages with his name.
A
thoroughgoing business man's will. It
named in minute detail every item of property he owned in the world--houses,
lands, sword, silver-gilt bowl, and so on--all the way down to his
"second-best bed" and its furniture.
It
carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among the members of his
family, overlooking no individual of it.
Not even his wife: the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry =
by
urgent grace of a special dispensation before he was nineteen; the wife who=
m he
had left husbandless so many years; the wife who had had to borrow forty-on=
e shillings
in her need, and which the lender was never able to collect of the prospero=
us
husband, but died at last with the money still lacking. No, even this wife =
was
remembered in Shakespeare's will.
He
left her that "second-best bed."
And not another thing ; not even a penny to =
bless
her lucky widowhood with.
It was
eminently and conspicuously a business man's will, not a poet's.
It
mentioned not a single book .
Books
were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt bowls and second-best b=
eds
in those days, and when a departing person owned one he gave it a high plac=
e in
his will.
The will mentioned not a play , not a poem , not an unfinished literary work , not a scrap of manuscript of any kind .<= o:p>
Many
poets have died poor, but this is the only one in history that has died
If
Shakespeare had owned a dog--but we need not go into that: we know he would
have mentioned it in his will. If =
a good
dog, Susanna would have got it; if an inferior one his wife would have got a
dower interest in it. I wish he ha=
d had
a dog, just so we could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog
among the family, in his careful business way.
He
signed the will in three places.
In
earlier years he signed two other official documents.
These
five signatures still exist.
There
are no other specimens of his penm=
anship
in existence . Not a line.
Was he
prejudiced against the art? His
granddaughter, whom he loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had=
had
no teaching, he left no provision for her education although he was rich, a=
nd
in her mature womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't tell her husband's
manuscript from anybody else's--she thought it was Shakespeare's.
When
Shakespeare died in Stratford it w=
as not
an event . It made no more stir in
England than the death of any other forgotten theatre-actor would have
made. Nobody came down from London;
there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears--there was me=
rely
silence, and nothing more. A strik=
ing
contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser,
and Raleigh and the other distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare's time
passed from life! No praiseful voi=
ce was
lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited seven years before=
he
lifted his.
So far as anybody actually knows and can=
prove
, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.
So far as anybody knows and can prove , =
he
never wrote a letter to anybody in his life.
So far as any one knows , he received only one letter during his l=
ife .
So far
as any one knows and can prove ,
Shakespeare of Stratford wrote only one poem during his life. This one is authentic. He did write that one--a fact which sta=
nds
undisputed; he wrote the whole of it; he wrote the whole of it out of his o=
wn
head. He commanded that this work =
of art
be engraved upon his tomb, and he was obeyed.
There it abides to this day. This
is it:
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare <=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> To digg the dust encloased heare:
In the
list as above set down, will be found every
positively known fact of Shakespea=
re's
life, lean and meagre as the invoice is.
Beyond these details we know not
a thing about him. All the rest of his vast history, as
furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses,
inferences, theories, conjectures--an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising
sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts=
.
The historians "suppose" that
Shakespeare attended the Free School in Stratford from the time he was seven
years old till he was thirteen. There is no evidence in existence that he ever went to school=
at
all.
The
historians "infer" that he got his Latin in that school--the scho=
ol which
they "suppose" he attended.
They "suppose"
his father's declining fortunes made it necessary for him to leave the scho=
ol
they supposed he attended, and get to work and help support his parents and
their ten children. But there is no
evidence that he ever entered or retired from the school they suppose he
attended.
They
"suppose" he assisted his father in the butchering business; and =
that,
being only a boy, he didn't have to do full-grown butchering, but only
slaughtered calves. Also, that whe=
never
he killed a calf he made a high-flown speech over it. This supposition rests upon the testimo=
ny of a
man who wasn't there at the time; a man who got it from a man who could have
been there, but did not say whether he was or not; and neither of them thou=
ght
to mention it for decades, and decades, and decades, and two more decades a=
fter
Shakespeare's death (until old age and mental decay had refreshed and vivif=
ied
their memories). They hadn't two f=
acts
in stock about the long-dead distinguished citizen, but only just the one: =
he
slaughtered calves and broke into oratory while he was at it. Curious. They had only one fact, yet the disting=
uished
citizen had spent twenty-six years in that little town--just half his
lifetime. However, rightly viewed,=
it
was the most important fact, indeed almost the only important fact, of
Shakespeare's life in Stratford. R=
ightly
viewed. For experience is an autho=
r's
most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the
breath and the warm blood into the book he writes. Rightly viewed, calf-butchering account=
s for Titus Andronicus , the only play--ain't
it?--that the Stratford Shakespeare ever wrote; and yet it is the only one
everybody tries to chouse him out of, the Baconians included.
The
historians find themselves "justified in believing" that the youn=
g Shakespeare
poached upon Sir Thomas Lucy's deer preserves and got haled before that
magistrate for it. But there is no=
shred
of respectworthy evidence that anything of the kind happened.
The
historians, having argued the thing that might have happened into the thing that did happen, found no trouble in turning Sir =
Thomas
Lucy into Mr. Justice Shallow. The=
y have
long ago convinced the world--on surmise and without trustworthy evidence--=
that
Shallow is Sir Thomas.
The
next addition to the young Shakespeare's Stratford history comes easy. The historian builds it out of the surm=
ised
deer-stealing, and the surmised trial before the magistrate, and the surmis=
ed
vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the play: result, the youn=
g Shakespeare
was a wild, wild, wild, oh such a wild young scamp, and that gratuitous =
slander
is established for all time! It is=
the
very way Professor Osborn and I built the colossal skeleton brontosaur that
stands fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high in the Natural History
Museum, the awe and admiration of all the world, the stateliest skeleton th=
at
exists on the planet. We had nine =
bones,
and we built the rest of him out of plaster of paris. We ran short of plaster of paris, or we=
'd
have built a brontosaur that could sit down beside the Stratford Shakespeare
and none but an expert could tell which was biggest or contained the most
plaster.
Shakespeare
pronounced Venus and Adonis "the first heir of his invention,&q=
uot;
apparently implying that it was his first effort at literary composition. He should not have said it. It has been an embarrassment to his
historians these many, many years. They
have to make him write that graceful and polished and flawless and beautiful
poem before he escaped from Stratford and his family--1586 or '87--age,
twenty-two, or along there; because within the next five years he wrote five
great plays, and could not have found time to write another line.
It is sorely embarrassing. If he began to slaughter calves, and poach deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at= the earliest likely moment--say at thirteen, when he was supposably wrenched fr= om that school where he was supposably storing up Latin for future literary use--he had his youthful hands full, and much more than full. He must have had to put aside his Warwickshire dialect, which wouldn't be understood in London, and study Eng= lish very hard. Very hard indeed; incre= dibly hard, almost, if the result of that labor was to be the smooth and rounded = and flexible and letter-perfect English of the = Venus and Adonis in the space of ten yea= rs; and at the same time learn great and fine and unsurpassable literary form.<= o:p>
However,
it is "conjectured" that he accomplished all this and more, much =
more:
learned law and its intricacies; and the complex procedure of the law court=
s;
and all about soldiering, and sailoring, and the manners and customs and wa=
ys
of royal courts and aristocratic society; and likewise accumulated in his o=
ne
head every kind of knowledge the learned then possessed, and every kind of
humble knowledge possessed by the lowly and the ignorant; and added thereto=
a
wider and more intimate knowledge of the world's great literatures, ancient=
and
modern, than was possessed by any other man of his time--for he was going to
make brilliant and easy and admiration-compelling use of these splendid
treasures the moment he got to London.
And according to the surmisers, that is what he did. Yes, although t=
here
was no one in Stratford able to teach him these things, and no library in t=
he
little village to dig them out of. His father
could not read, and even the surmisers surmise that he did not keep a libra=
ry.
It is
surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got his vast knowled=
ge
of the law and his familiar and accurate acquaintance with the manners and
customs and shop-talk of lawyers through being for a time the clerk of a Stratford court ; just as a b=
right
lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of the Mississippi, might bec=
ome
perfect in knowledge of the Behring Strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk =
of
the veteran exercisers of that adventure-bristling trade through catching c=
atfish
with a "trot-line" Sundays.
But the surmise is damaged by the fact that there is no evidence--and
not even tradition--that the young Shakespeare was ever clerk of a law cour=
t.
It is
further surmised that the young Shakespeare accumulated his law-treasures in
the first years of his sojourn in London, through "amusing himself&quo=
t;
by learning book-law in his garret and by picking up lawyer-talk and the re=
st
of it through loitering about the law-courts and listening. But it is only surmise; there is no
There
is a legend that he got his bread and butter by holding horses in front of =
the
London theatres, mornings and afternoons.
Maybe he did. If he did, it
seriously shortened his law-study hours and his recreation-time in the
courts. In those very days he was =
writing
great plays, and needed all the time he could get. The horse-holding legend ought to be
strangled; it too formidably increases the historian's difficulty in accoun=
ting
for the young Shakespeare's erudition--an erudition which he was acquiring,
hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk every day in those strenuous times, and
emptying each day's catch into next day's imperishable drama.
He had
to acquire a knowledge of war at the same time; and a knowledge of soldier-=
people
and sailor-people and their ways and talk; also a knowledge of some foreign
lands and their languages: for he was daily emptying fluent streams of these
various knowledges, too, into his dramas.
How did he acquire these rich assets?
In the
usual way: by surmise. It is surmised that he travelled in Italy and Germany a=
nd
around, and qualified himself to put their scenic and social aspects upon
paper; that he perfected himself in French, Italian and Spanish on the road;
that he went in Leicester's expedition to the Low Countries, as soldier or =
sutler
or something, for several months or years--or whatever length of time a
surmiser needs in his business--and thus became familiar with soldiership a=
nd
soldier-ways and soldier-talk, and generalship and general-ways and
general-talk, and seamanship and sailor-ways and sailor-talk.
Maybe
he did all these things, but I would like to know who held the horses in the
meantime; and who studied the books in the garret; and who frollicked in the
law-courts for recreation. Also, w=
ho did
the call-boying and the play-acting.
For he
became a call-boy; and as early as '93 he became a "vagabond"--th=
e law's
ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in '94 a "regular" and p=
roperly
and officially listed member of that (in those days) lightly-valued and not
much respected profession.
Right
soon thereafter he became a stockholder in two theatres, and manager of
them. Thenceforward he was a busy =
and
flourishing business man, and was raking in money with both hands for twenty
years. Then in a noble frenzy of p=
oetic
inspiration he wrote his one poem--his only poem, his darling--and laid him
down and died:
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare <=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> To digg the dust encloased heare:
He was
probably dead when he wrote it. St=
ill,
this is only conjecture. We have only circumstantial evidence. Internal evidence.
Shall
I set down the rest of the Conjectures which constitute the giant Biography=
of
William Shakespeare? It would stra=
in the
Unabridged Dictionary to hold them. He
is a Brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of paris.
In the Assuming trade three separate and
independent cults are transacting business.
Two of these cults are known as the Shakespearites and the Baconians,
and I am the other one--the Brontosaurian.
The
Shakespearite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's Works; the Baconian
knows that Francis Bacon wrote them; the Brontosaurian doesn't really know
which of them did it, but is quite composedly and contentedly sure that
Shakespeare didn't , and strongly
suspects that Bacon did . We all h=
ave to
do a good deal of assuming, but I am fairly certain that in every case I can
call to mind the Baconian assumers have come out ahead of the
Shakespearites. Both parties handl=
e the
same materials, but the Baconians seem to me to get much more reasonable and
rational and persuasive results out of them than is the case with the
Shakespearites. The Shakespearite conducts his assuming upon a definite
principle, an unchanging and immutable law--which is: 2 and 8 and 7 and 14,
added together, make 165. I believ=
e this
to be an error. No matter, you can=
not
get a habit-sodden Shakespearite to cipher-up his materials upon any other
basis. With the Baconian it is
different. If you place before him=
the
above figures and set him to adding them up, he will never in any case get =
more
than 45 out of them, and in nine cases out of ten he will get just the prop=
er
31.
Let me
try to illustrate the two systems in a simple and homely way calculated to
bring the idea within the grasp of the ignorant and unintelligent. We will suppose a case: take a lap-bred,
house-fed, uneducated, inexperienced kitten; take a rugged old Tom that's
scarred from stem to rudder-post with the memorials of strenuous experience,
and is so cultured, so educated, so limitlessly erudite that one may say of=
him
"all cat-knowledge is his province"; also, take a mouse. Lock the three up in a holeless, crackl=
ess,
exitless prison-cell. Wait half an=
hour,
then open the cell, introduce a Shakespearite and a Baconian, and let them
cipher and assume. The mouse is mi=
ssing:
the question to be decided is, where is it?
You can guess both verdicts beforehand.
One verdict will say the kitten contains the mouse; the other will a=
s certainly
say the mouse is in the tomcat.
The
Shakespearite will Reason like this--(that is not my word, it is his). He will say the kitten may have been attending school when nobody was noticin=
g;
therefore we are warranted in assu=
ming that it did so; also, it could have been training in a court-clerk's office when =
no one
was noticing; since that could have happened, we are justified in assuming that it did happen; it could have studied catology in a garret =
when no one was noticing--therefore it <=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> did ; it could have attended cat-assizes on the shed-roof ni=
ghts,
for recreation, when no one was noticing, and harvested a knowledge of cat
court-forms and cat lawyer-talk in that way: it could have done it, therefore without a doubt =
it
did; it could have gone soldiering with a war-tribe when no one was noticin=
g,
and learned soldier-wiles and soldier-ways, and what to do with a mouse when
opportunity offers; the plain inference, therefore is, that that is what it=
did .
Since all these manifold things =
span>could
have occurred, we have every right to believe they did occur. These patiently and painstakingly accum=
ulated
vast acquirements and competences needed but one thing more--opportunity--to
convert themselves into triumphant action.
The opportunity came, we have the result; beyond shadow of question the mouse is in the kitten.
It is
proper to remark that when we of the three cults plant a " We think we=
may
assume ," we expect it, under careful watering and fertilizing and ten=
ding,
to grow up into a strong and hardy and weather-defying " there isn't a
shadow of a doubt " at last--and it usually happens.
We
know what the Baconian's verdict would be: " There is not a rag of evi=
dence
that the kitten has had any training , =
span>any
education , any experience qualify=
ing it
for the present occasion , or is i=
ndeed equipped
for any achievement above lifting such unclaimed milk as comes its way ; but there is abundant evidence -- unassa=
ilable
proof , in fact -- that the other =
animal
is equipped , to the last detail ,=
with every qualification necessary for t=
he
event . Without shadow of doubt the tomcat conta=
ins
the mouse ."
When Shakespeare died, in 1616, great li=
terary
productions attributed to him as author had been before the London world an=
d in
high favor for twenty-four years. =
Yet
his death was not an event. It mad=
e no
stir, it attracted no attention.
Apparently his eminent literary contemporaries did not realize that a
celebrated poet had passed from their midst. Perhaps they knew a play-actor=
of
minor rank had disappeared, but did not regard him as the author of his
Works. "We are justified in
assuming" this.
His
death was not even an event in the little town of Stratford. Does this mean that in Stratford he was=
not
regarded as a celebrity of any
"We
are privileged to assume"--no, we are indeed obliged to assume--that such was the case. He had spent the first twenty-two or tw=
enty-three
years of his life there, and of course knew everybody and was known by
everybody of that day in the town, including the dogs and the cats and the
horses. He had spent the last five=
or
six years of his life there, diligently trading in every big and little thi=
ng
that had money in it; so we are compelled to assume that many of the folk t=
here
in those said latter days knew him personally, and the rest by sight and he=
arsay. But not as a celebrity ?
Apparently not. For everybo=
dy
soon forgot to remember any contact with him or any incident connected with=
him. The dozens of townspeople, still alive,=
who
had known of him or known about him in the first twenty-three years of his =
life
were in the same unremembering condition: if they knew of any incident
connected with that period of his life they didn't tell about it. Would they if they had been asked? It is most likely. Were they asked? It is pretty apparent that they were
not. Why weren't they? It is a very plausible guess that nobody
there or elsewhere was interested to know.
For
seven years after Shakespeare's death nobody seems to have been interested =
in
him. Then the quarto was published=
, and
Ben Jonson awoke out of his long indifference and sang a song of praise and=
put
it in the front of the book. Then
silence fell again .
For
sixty years. Then inquiries into
Shakespeare's Stratford life began to be made, of Stratfordians. Of Stratfordians who had known Shakespe=
are or
had seen him? No. Then of Stratfordians who had seen peop=
le who
had known or seen people who had seen Shakespeare? No.
Apparently the inquiries were only made of Stratfordians who were not
Stratfordians of Shakespeare's day, but later comers; and what they had lea=
rned
had come to them from persons who had not seen Shakespeare; and what they h=
ad learned
was not claimed as fact , but only=
as
legend--dim and fading and indefinite legend; legend of the calf-slaughteri=
ng
rank, and not worth remembering either as history or fiction.
Has it
ever happened before--or since--that a celebrated person who had spent exac=
tly
half of a fairly long life in the village where he was born and reared, was
able to slip out of this world and leave that village voiceless and gossipl=
ess
behind him--utterly voiceless, utterly gossipless? And permanently so? I don't believe it has happened in any =
case
except Shakespeare's. And couldn't=
and
wouldn't have happened in his case if he had been regarded as a celebrity at
the time of his death.
When I
examine my own case--but let us do that, and see if it will not be recogniz=
able
as exhibiting a condition of things quite likely to result, most likely to
result, indeed substantially sure =
to result in the case of a celebrated pe=
rson,
a benefactor of the human race. Li=
ke me.
My
parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the
Mississippi, when I was two and a half years old. I entered school at five years of age, =
and
drifted from one school to another in the village during nine and a half
years. Then my father died, leavin=
g his
family in exceedingly straitened circumstances; wherefore my book-education
came to a standstill forever, and I became a printer's apprentice, on board=
and
clothes, and when the clothes failed I got a hymn-book in place of them.
Now
then. Shakespeare died young--he w=
as
only fifty-two. He had lived in his
native village twenty-six years, or about that.
He died celebrated (if you believe everything you read in the
books). Yet when he died nobody th=
ere or
elsewhere took any notice of it; and for sixty years afterward no townsman =
remembered
to say anything about him or about his life in Stratford. When the inquirer came at last he got b=
ut one
fact--no, legend --and got that on=
e at
second hand, from a person who had only heard it as a rumor, and didn't cla=
im
copyright in it as a production of his own.
He couldn't, very well, for its date antedated his own birth-date. But necessarily a number of persons were
still alive in Stratford who, in the days of their youth, had seen Shakespe=
are
nearly every day in the last five years of his life, and they would have be=
en able
to tell that inquirer some first-hand things about him if he had in those l=
ast
days been a celebrity and therefore a person of interest to the villagers.<=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> Why did not the inquirer hunt them up a=
nd
interview them? Wasn't it worth while?
Wasn't the matter of sufficient consequence? Had the inquirer an engagement to see a
dog-fight and couldn't spare the time?
It all
seems to mean that he never had any literary celebrity, there or elsewhere,=
and
no considerable repute as actor and manager.
Now
then, I am away along in life--my seventy-third year being already well beh=
ind
me--yet sixteen of my Hannibal schoolmates are still ali=
ve to-day,
and can tell--and do tell--inquirers dozens and dozens of incidents of their
young lives and mine together; things that happened to us in the morning of
life, in the blossom of our youth, in the good days, the dear days, "t=
he
days when we went gipsying, a long time ago." Most of them creditable to me, too. One child to whom I paid court when she=
was
five years old and I eight still lives in Hannibal, and she visited me last
summer, traversing the necessary ten or twelve hundred miles of railroad
without damage to her patience or to her old-young vigor. Another little la=
ssie
to whom I paid attention in Hannibal when she was nine years old and I the
same, is still alive--in London--and hale and hearty, just as I am. And on the few surviving steamboats--th=
ose lingering
ghosts and remembrancers of great fleets that plied the big river in the be=
ginning
of my water-career--which is exactly as long ago as the whole invoice of the
life-years of Shakespeare number--there are still findable two or three
river-pilots who saw me do creditable things in those ancient days; and sev=
eral
white-headed engineers; and several roustabouts and mates; and several
deck-hands who used to heave the lead for me and send up on the still night=
air
the "six--feet-- scant !" that made me shudder, and the " M-=
a-r-k--twain
!" that took the shudder away, and presently the darling "By the
d-e-e-p--four!" that lifted me to heaven for joy. {1} They know about me, and can tell. And so do printers, from St. Louis to N=
ew
York; and so do newspaper reporters, from Nevada to San Francisco. And so do the police. If Shakespeare had really been celebrat=
ed,
like me, Stratford could have told things about him; and if my experience g=
oes
for anything, they'd have done it.
If I had under my superintendence a
controversy appointed to decide whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or no=
t, I
believe I would place before the debaters only the one question, Was Shakespeare ever a practicing lawyer=
? and
leave everything else out.
It is
maintained that the man who wrote the plays was not merely myriad-minded, b=
ut
also myriad-accomplished: that he not only knew some thousands of things ab=
out
human life in all its shades and grades, and about the hundred arts and tra=
des
and crafts and professions which men busy themselves in, but that he could =
talk about the men and their grades and trades
accurately, making no mistakes. Ma=
ybe it
is so, but have the experts spoken, or is it only Tom, Dick, and Harry? Does the exhibit stand upon wide, and l=
oose,
and eloquent generalizing--which is not evidence, and not proof--or upon
details, particulars, statistics, illustrations, demonstrations?
Experts
of unchallengeable authority have testified definitely as to only one of
Shakespeare's multifarious craft-equipments, so far as my recollections of
Shakespeare-Bacon talk abide with me--his law-equipment. I do not remember =
that
Wellington or Napoleon ever examined Shakespeare's battles and sieges and
strategies, and then decided and established for good and all, that they we=
re
militarily flawless; I do not remember that any Nelson, or Drake or Cook ev=
er
examined his seamanship and said it showed profound and accurate familiarity
with that art; I don't remember that any king or prince or duke has ever
testified that Shakespeare was letter-perfect in his handling of royal
court-manners and the talk and manners of aristocracies; I don't remember t=
hat
any illustrious Latinist or Grecian or Frenchman or Spaniard or Italian has
proclaimed him a past-master in those languages; I don't remember--well, I
don't remember that there is testi=
mony --great
testimony--imposing testimony--unanswerable and unattackable testimony as to
any of Shakespeare's hundred specialties, except one--the law.
Other
things change, with time, and the student cannot trace back with certainty =
the
changes that various trades and their processes and technicalities have
undergone in the long stretch of a century or two and find out what their
processes and technicalities were in those early days, but with the law it =
is
different: it is mile-stoned and documented all the way back, and the maste=
r of
that wonderful trade, that complex and intricate trade, that awe-compelling
trade, has competent ways of knowing whether Shakespeare-law is good law or
not; and whether his law-court procedure is correct or not, and whether his
legal shop-talk is the shop-talk of a veteran practitioner or only a
machine-made counterfeit of it gathered from books and from occasional
loiterings in Westminster.
Richard
H. Dana served two years before the mast, and had every experience that fal=
ls
to the lot of the sailor before the mast of our day. His sailor-talk flows from his pen with=
the
sure touch and the ease and confidence of a person who has lived what he is talking about, not gathered i=
t from
books and random listenings. Hear =
him:
Having hove short, cast off the gaske=
ts,
and made the bunt of each sail =
fast
by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the word the whole canvas of the ship was loosed, =
and
with the greatest rapidity poss=
ible
everything was sheeted home and hoisted up, the anchor tripped and cat-headed, and the ship =
under
headway.
Again:
The royal yards were all crossed at o=
nce,
and royals and sky-sails set, a=
nd, as
we had the wind free, the booms were run out, and all were aloft, active as cats, laying ou=
t on
the yards and booms, reeving the
studding-sail gear; and sail after sail the captain piled upon her, until she was covered with
canvas, her sails looking like a great white cloud resting upon a black
speck.
Once
more. A race in the Pacific:
Our antagonist was in her best trim.<=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> Being clear of the point, the breeze became stiff, and the royal-ma=
sts
bent under our sails, but we wo=
uld
not take them in until we saw three boys spring into the rigging of the California ; then they were all furled at
once, but with orders to our bo=
ys to
stay aloft at the top-gallant mast-heads and loose them again at the word. It was my duty to furl the fore-royal; and while standing by to =
loose
it again, I had a fine view of =
the scene. From where I stood, the two vessels see=
med nothing but spars and sails, while th=
eir
narrow decks, far below, slanti=
ng
over by the force of the wind aloft, appeared hardly capable of supporting the great fabrics raise=
d upon
them. The California was
to windward of us, and had every advantage; yet, while the breeze was stiff we held our own. As soon as it began to slacken she rang=
ed a little ahead, and the order was giv=
en to
loose the royals. In an instant the gaskets were off and the =
bunt
dropped. "Sheet home the fore-royal!"--"Weather shee=
t's
home!"--"Lee sheet's home!"--"Hoist away, sir!" is bawled from aloft=
. "Overhaul your clewlines!" sh=
outs the mate.
"Aye-aye, sir, all clear!"--"Taut leech! belay! Well the lee brace; haul taut to windward!&quo=
t; and
the royals are set.
What
would the captain of any sailing-vessel of our time say to that? He would say, "The man that wrote =
that
didn't learn his trade out of a book, he has been there!"
But would this same captain be competent to sit in judgment upon
Shakespeare's seamanship--considering the changes in ships and ship-talk th=
at
have necessarily taken place, unrecorded, unremembered, and lost to history=
in
the last three hundred years? It i=
s my
conviction that Shakespeare's sailor-talk would be Choctaw to him. For
instance--from The Tempest :
Master
. Boatswain!
Boatswain
. Here, master; what cheer?
Master
. Good, speak to the mariners: fall
to't, yarely, or we run ourselv=
es to
ground; bestir, bestir!
( Enter mariners .)
Boatswain
. Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheer=
ly, my
hearts! yare, yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to the master's whistle . . . Down=
with the topmast! yare! lower, lower!=
Bring her to try wi' the main course . . . Lay her a-hold, a-hold!<=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> Set her two courses. Off to sea again; lay her off.
That
will do, for the present; let us yare a little, now, for a change.
If a
man should write a book and in it make one of his characters say, "Her=
e,
devil, empty the quoins into the standing galley and the imposing stone into
the hell-box; assemble the comps around the frisket and let them jeff for t=
akes
and be quick about it," I should recognize a mistake or two in the
phrasing, and would know that the writer was only a printer theoretically, =
not
practically.
I have
been a quartz miner in the silver regions--a pretty hard life; I know all t=
he
palaver of that business: I know all about discovery claims and the subordi=
nate
claims; I know all about lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles,
shafts, drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," =
clay
casings, granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries; arastras, and h=
ow
to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of copper; and how to clean th=
em
up, and how to reduce the resulting amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast=
the
bullion into pigs; and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how =
to
hunt for something less robust to do, and find it. I know the argot of the quartz-mining and milling industry
familiarly; and so whenever Bret Harte introduces that industry into a stor=
y,
the first time one of his miners opens his mouth I recognize from his phras=
ing
that Harte got the phrasing by listening--like Shakespeare--I mean the
Stratford one--not by experience. =
No one
can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with pick and sho=
vel
and drill and fuse.
I have
been a surface-miner--gold--and I know all its mysteries, and the dialect t=
hat
belongs with them; and whenever Harte introduces that industry into a story=
I
know by the phrasing of his characters that neither he nor they have ever
served that trade.
I have
been a "pocket" miner--a sort of gold mining not findable in any =
but
one little spot in the world, so far as I know.
I know how, with horn and water, to find the trail of a pocket and t=
race
it step by step and stage by stage up the mountain to its source, and find =
the
compact little nest of yellow metal reposing in its secret home under the
ground. I know the language of that trade, that capricious trade, that fasc=
inating
buried-treasure trade, and can catch any writer who tries to use it without
having learned it by the sweat of his brow and the labor of his hands.
I know
several other trades and the argot=
that goes with them; and whenever a pers=
on
tries to talk the talk peculiar to any of them without having learned it at=
its
source I can trap him always before he gets far on his road.
And
so, as I have already remarked, if I were required to superintend a Bacon-S=
hakespeare
controversy, I would narrow the matter down to a single question--the only =
one,
so far as the previous controversies have informed me, concerning which
illustrious experts of unimpeachable competency have testified: Was the author of Shakespeare's Works a =
lawyer
?--a lawyer deeply read and of limitless experience? I would put aside the guesses, and surm=
ises,
and perhapses, and might-have-beens, and could-have beens, and must-have-be=
ens,
and we-are justified-in-presumings, and the rest of those vague spectres and
shadows and indefinitenesses, and stand or fall, win or lose, by the verdic=
t rendered
by the jury upon that single question.
If the verdict was Yes, I should feel quite convinced that the Strat=
ford
Shakespeare, the actor, manager, and trader who died so obscure, so forgott=
en,
so destitute of even village consequence that sixty years afterward no
fellow-citizen and friend of his later days remembered to tell anything abo=
ut
him, did not write the Works.
Chapter
XIII of The Shakespeare Problem Re=
stated
bears the heading "Shakespear=
e as a
Lawyer," and comprises some fifty pages of expert testimony, with comm=
ents
thereon, and I will copy the first nine, as being sufficient all by themsel=
ves,
as it seems to me, to settle the question which I have conceived to be the
master-key to the Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.
The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare supply
ample evidence that their author not only had a very extensive and accurate
knowledge of law, but that he was well acquainted with the manners and cust=
oms
of members of the Inns of Court and with legal life generally.
"While
novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the laws of
marriage, of wills, and inheritance, to Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he
expounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor wri=
t of
error." Such was the testimony
borne by one of the most distinguished lawyers of the nineteenth century who
was raised to the high office of Lord Chief Justice in 1850, and subsequent=
ly
became Lord Chancellor. Its weight=
will,
doubtless, be more appreciated by lawyers than by laymen, for only lawyers =
know
how impossible it is for those who have not served an apprenticeship to the=
law
to avoid displaying their ignorance if they venture to employ legal terms a=
nd
to discuss legal doctrines. "=
There
is nothing so dangerous," wrote Lord Campbell, "as for one not of=
the
craft to tamper with our freemasonry." A layman is certain to betray
himself by using some expression which a lawyer would never employ. Mr. Sidney Lee himself supplies us with=
an example
of this. He writes (p. 164): "=
;On
February 15, 1609, Shakespeare . . . obtained judgment from a jury against
Addenbroke for the payment of No. 6, and No. 1. 5 s. 0 d. costs."
Now a lawyer would never have spoken of obtaining "judgment fro=
m a
jury," for it is the function of a jury not to deliver judgment (which=
is
the prerogative of the court), but to find a verdict on the facts. The error is, indeed, a venial one, but=
it is
just one of those little things which at once enable a lawyer to know if the
writer is a layman or "one of the craft."
But
when a layman ventures to plunge deeply into legal subjects, he is naturally
apt to make an exhibition of his incompetence.
"Let a non-professional man, however acute," writes Lord
Campbell again, "presume to talk law, or to draw illustrations from le=
gal
science in discussing other subjects, and he will speedily fall into laugha=
ble absurdity."
And
what does the same high authority say about Shakespeare? He had "a deep technical knowledge=
of
the law," and an easy familiarity with "some of the most abstruse
proceedings in English jurisprudence."
And again: "Whenever he indulges this propensity he uniformly l=
ays
down good law." Of Henry IV. =
, Part
2, he says: "If Lord Eldon could be supposed to have written the play,=
I
do not see how he could be chargeable with having forgotten any of his law
while writing it." Charles an=
d Mary
Cowden Clarke speak of "the marvelous intimacy which he displays with
legal terms, his frequent adoption of them in illustration, and his curious=
ly technical
knowledge of their form and force."
Malone, himself a lawyer, wrote: "His knowledge of legal terms =
is
not merely such as might be acquired by the casual observation of even his
all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of technical skill." Another lawyer and well-known Shakespea=
rean,
Richard Grant White, says: "No dramatist of the time, not even Beaumon=
t,
who was the younger son of a judge of the Common Pleas, and who after study=
ing
in the Inns of Court abandoned law for the drama, used legal phrases with
Shakespeare's readiness and exactness.
And the significance of this fact is heightened by another, that it =
is
only to the language of the law that he exhibits this inclination. The phrases peculiar to other occupatio=
ns
serve him on rare occasions by way of description, comparison or illustrati=
on,
generally when something in the scene suggests them, but legal phrases flow
from his pen as part of his vocabulary, and parcel of his thought. Take the word 'purchase' for instance, =
which,
in ordinary use, means to acquire by giving value, but applies in law to all
legal modes of obtaining property except by inheritance or descent, and in =
this
peculiar sense the word occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-four play=
s,
and only in one single instance in the fifty-four plays of Beaumont and
Fletcher. It has been suggested th=
at it
was in attendance upon the courts in London that he picked up his legal
vocabulary. But this supposition n=
ot
only fails to account for Shakespeare's peculiar freedom and exactness in t=
he
use of that phraseology, it does not even place him in the way of learning
those terms his use of which is most remarkable, which are not such as he w=
ould
have heard at ordinary proceedings at nisi
prius , but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real property, 'fine=
and
recovery,' 'statutes merchant,' 'purchase,' 'indenture,' 'tenure,' 'double
voucher,' 'fee simple,' 'fee farm,' 'remainder,' 'reversion,' 'forfeiture,'
etc. This conveyancer's jargon cou=
ld not
have been picked up by hanging round the courts of law in London two hundred
and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title of real property were compa=
ratively
rare. And beside, Shakespeare uses=
his
law just as freely in his first plays, written in his first London years, a=
s in
those produced at a later period. =
Just
as exactly, too; for the correctness and propriety with which these terms a=
re
introduced have compelled the admiration of a Chief Justice and a Lord
Chancellor."
Senator
Davis wrote: "We seem to have something more than a sciolist's temerit=
y of
indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar art.
No legal solecisms will be found.
The abstrusest elements of the common law are impressed into a
disciplined service. Over and over
again, where such knowledge is unexampled in writers unlearned in the law,
Shakespeare appears in perfect possession of it. In the law of real property, its rules =
of
tenure and descents, its entails, its fines and recoveries, their vouchers =
and
double vouchers, in the procedure of the Courts, the method of bringing wri=
ts
and arrests, the nature of actions, the rules of pleading, the law of escap=
es
and of contempt of court, in the principles of evidence, both technical and
philosophical, in the distinction between the temporal and spiritual tribun=
als,
in the law of attainder and forfeiture, in the requisites of a valid marria=
ge,
in the presumption of legitimacy, in the learning of the law of prerogative=
, in
the inalienable character of the Crown, this mastership appears with surpri=
sing
authority."
To all
this testimony (and there is much more which I have not cited) may now be a=
dded
that of a great lawyer of our own times, viz. : Sir James Plaisted Wilde, Q.C. cr=
eated
a Baron of the Exchequer in 1860, promoted to the post of Judge-Ordinary and
Judge of the Courts of Probate and Divorce in 1863, and better known to the
world as Lord Penzance, to which dignity he was raised in 1869. Lord Penzance, as all lawyers know, and=
as
the late Mr. Inderwick, K.C., has testified, was one of the first legal
authorities of his day, famous for his "remarkable grasp of legal prin=
ciples,"
and "endowed by nature with a remarkable facility for marshalling fact=
s,
and for a clear expression of his views."
Lord
Penzance speaks of Shakespeare's "perfect familiarity with not only the
principles, axioms, and maxims, but the technicalities of English law, a
knowledge so perfect and intimate that he was never incorrect and never at
fault . . . The mode in which this knowledge was pressed into service on all
occasions to express his meaning and illustrate his thoughts, was quite
unexampled. He seems to have had a
special pleasure in his complete and ready mastership of it in all its
branches. As manifested in the pla=
ys,
this legal knowledge and learning had therefore a special character which
places it on a wholly different footing from the rest of the multifarious
knowledge which is exhibited in page after page of the plays. At every turn and point at which the au=
thor
required a metaphor, simile, or illustration, his mind ever turned first to the law.
He seems almost to have tho=
ught in legal phrases, the commonest of legal
expressions were ever at the end of his pen in description or illustration.=
That he should have descanted in lawyer
language when he had a forensic subject in hand, such as Shylock's bond, wa=
s to
be expected, but the knowledge of law in 'Shakespeare' was exhibited in a f=
ar
different manner: it protruded itself on all occasions, appropriate or
inappropriate, and mingled itself with strains of thought widely divergent =
from
forensic subjects." Again: &q=
uot;To
acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles, and an accurate and re=
ady
use of the technical terms and phrases not only of the conveyancer's office=
but
of the pleader's chambers and the Courts at Westminster, nothing short of e=
mployment
in some career involving constant contact with legal questions and general
legal work would be requisite. But=
a
continuous employment involves the element of time, and time was just what =
the
manager of two theatres had not at his disposal. In what portion of Shakespeare's ( i.e.=
Shakspere's) career would it be possible=
to
point out that time could be found for the interposition of a legal employm=
ent
in the chambers or offices of practising lawyers?"
Stratfordians,
as is well known, casting about for some possible explanation of Shakespear=
e's
extraordinary knowledge of law, have made the suggestion that Shakespeare
might, conceivably, have been a clerk in an attorney's office before he cam=
e to
London. Mr. Collier wrote to Lord =
Campbell
to ask his opinion as to the probability of this being true. His answer was=
as
follows: "You require us to believe implicitly a fact, of which, if tr=
ue,
positive and irrefragable evidence in his own handwriting might have been
forthcoming to establish it. Not h=
aving
been actually enrolled as an attorney, neither the records of the local cou=
rt at
Stratford nor of the superior Courts at Westminster would present his name =
as
being concerned in any suit as an attorney, but it might reasonably have be=
en
expected that there would be deeds or wills witnessed by him still extant, =
and
after a very diligent search none such can be discovered."
Upon this Lord Penzance comments: "It cannot be doubted that Lord Campbell = was right in this. No young man could = have been at work in an attorney's office without being called upon continually = to act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work and name." There is not a single fact or incident in all that is known of = Shakespeare, even by rumor or tradition, which supports this notion of a clerkship. And after much argument and surmise whi= ch has been indulged in on this subject, we may, I think, safely put the notion on= one side, for no less an authority than Mr. Grant White says finally that the i= dea of his having been clerk to an attorney has been "blown to pieces."<= o:p>
It is
altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that he, nevertheless, ado=
pts
this exploded myth. "That
Shakespeare was in early life employed as a clerk in an attorney's office, =
may
be correct. At Stratford there was=
by
royal charter a Court of Record sitting every fortnight, with six attorneys=
, beside
the town clerk, belonging to it, and it is certainly not straining probabil=
ity
to suppose that the young Shakespeare may have had employment in one of
them. There is, it is true, no tra=
dition
to this effect, but such traditions as we have about Shakespeare's occupati=
on
between the time of leaving school and going to London are so loose and
baseless that no confidence can be placed in them. It is, to say the least, more probable =
that
he was in an attorney's office than that he was a butcher killing calves 'i=
n a
high style,' and making speeches over them."
This
is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument. There is, as we have seen, a very old
tradition that Shakespeare was a butcher's apprentice. John Dowdall, who made a tour in Warwic=
kshire
in 1693, testifies to it as coming from the old clerk who showed him over t=
he church,
and it is unhesitatingly accepted as true by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps. (Vol I, p. 11, and see Vol. II, p. 71,
72.) Mr. Sidney Lee sees nothing
improbable in it, and it is supported by Aubrey, who must have written his
account some time before 1680, when his manuscript was completed. Of the attorney's clerk hypothesis, on =
the other
hand, there is not the faintest vestige of a tradition. It has been evolved out of the fertile
imaginations of embarrassed Stratfordians, seeking for some explanation of =
the
Stratford rustic's marvellous acquaintance with law and legal terms and leg=
al
life. But Mr. Churton Collins has =
not
the least hesitation in throwing over the tradition which has the warrant of
antiquity and setting up in its stead this ridiculous invention, for which =
not
only is there no shred of positive evidence, but which, as Lord Campbell and
Lord Penzance point out, is really put out of court by the negative evidenc=
e,
since "no young man could have been at work in an attorney's office
without being called upon continually to act as a witness, and in many other
ways leaving traces of his work and name."
And as Mr. Edwards further points out, since the day when Lord Campb=
ell's
book was published (between forty and fifty years ago), "every old dee=
d or
will, to say nothing of other legal papers, dated during the period of Will=
iam
Shakespeare's youth, has been scrutinized over half a dozen shires, and not=
one
signature of the young man has been found."
Moreover,
if Shakespeare had served as clerk in an attorney's office it is clear that=
he
must have so served for a considerable period in order to have gained (if
indeed it is credible that he could have so gained) his remarkable knowledg=
e of
law. Can we then for a moment beli=
eve
that, if this had been so, tradition would have been absolutely silent on t=
he matter? That Dowdall's old clerk, over eighty y=
ears
of age, should have never heard of it (though he was sure enough about the
butcher's apprentice), and that all the other ancient witnesses should be i=
n similar
ignorance!
But
such are the methods of Stratfordian controversy. Tradition is to be scouted when it is f=
ound
inconvenient, but cited as irrefragable truth when it suits the case. Shakespeare of Stratford was the author=
of
the Plays and =
span>Poems
, but the author of the Plays and =
span>Poems
could not have been a butcher's
apprentice. Away, therefore, with
tradition. But the author of the <=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> Plays and =
span>Poems
must have had a very large and a v=
ery
accurate knowledge of the law.
Therefore, Shakespeare of Stratford must have been an attorney's
clerk! The method is simplicity
itself. By similar reasoning Shake=
speare
has been made a country schoolmaster, a soldier, a physician, a printer, an=
d a
good many other things beside, according to the inclination and the exigenc=
ies
of the commentator. It would not b=
e in
the least surprising to find that he was studying Latin as a schoolmaster a=
nd
law in an attorney's office at the same time.
However,
we must do Mr. Collins the justice of saying that he has fully recognized, =
what
is indeed tolerably obvious, that Shakespeare must have had a sound legal
training. "It may, of course,=
be
urged," he writes, "that Shakespeare's knowledge of medicine, and
particularly that branch of it which related to morbid psychology, is equal=
ly
remarkable, and that no one has ever contended that he was a physician. (Here Mr. Collins is wrong; that conten=
tion
also has been put forward.) It may be urged that his acquaintance with the
technicalities of other crafts and callings, notably of marine and military
affairs, was also extraordinary, and yet no one has suspected him of being a
sailor or a soldier. (Wrong again.=
Why
even Messrs. Garnett and Gosse 'suspect' that he was a soldier!) This may be
conceded, but the concession hardly furnishes an analogy. To these and all other subjects he recu=
rs
occasionally, and in season, but with reminiscences of the law his memory, =
as
is abundantly clear, was simply saturated.
In season and out of season now in manifest, now in recondite
application, he presses it into the service of expression and illustration.=
At least a third of his myriad metaphor=
s are
derived from it. It would indeed be
difficult to find a single act in any of his dramas, nay, in some of them, a
single scene, the diction and imagery of which is not colored by it. Much of his law may have been acquired =
from three
books easily accessible to him, namely Tottell's Precedents (1572), Pulton's Statutes (1578), and Fraunce's Lawier's Logike (1588), works with which he certainly se=
ems to
have been familiar; but much of it could only have come from one who had an
intimate acquaintance with legal proceedings.
We quite agree with Mr. Castle that Shakespeare's legal knowledge is=
not
what could have been picked up in an attorney's office, but could only have
been learned by an actual attendance at the Courts, at a Pleader's Chambers,
and on circuit, or by associating intimately with members of the Bench and
Bar."
This
is excellent. But what is Mr. Coll=
ins'
explanation. "Perhaps the sim=
plest
solution of the problem is to accept the hypothesis that in early life he w=
as
in an attorney's office (!), that he there contracted a love for the law wh=
ich
never left him, that as a young man in London, he continued to study or dab=
ble
in it for his amusement, to stroll in leisure hours into the Courts, and to
frequent the society of lawyers. On no other supposition is it possible to
explain the attraction which the law evidently had for him, and his minute =
and
undeviating accuracy in a subject where no layman who has indulged in such
copious and ostentatious display of legal technicalities has ever yet succe=
eded
in keeping himself from tripping."
A lame
conclusion. "No other
supposition" indeed! Yes, the=
re is another,
and a very obvious supposition, namely, that Shakespeare was himself a lawy=
er,
well versed in his trade, versed in all the ways of the courts, and living =
in
close intimacy with judges and members of the Inns of Court.
One
is, of course, thankful that Mr. Collins has appreciated the fact that
Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training, but I may be forgiven if =
I do
not attach quite so much importance to his pronouncements on this branch of=
the
subject as to those of Malone, Lord Campbell, Judge Holmes, Mr. Castle, K.C=
.,
Lord Penzance, Mr. Grant White, and other lawyers, who have expressed their
opinion on the matter of Shakespeare's legal acquirements.
Here
it may, perhaps, be worth while to quote again from Lord Penzance's book as=
to
the suggestion that Shakespeare had somehow or other managed "to acqui=
re a
perfect familiarity with legal principles, and an accurate and ready use of=
the
technical terms and phrases, not only of the conveyancer's office, but of t=
he
pleader's chambers and the courts at Westminster." This, as Lord Penzance points out,
"would require nothing short of employment in some career involving constant contact with legal questions and general legal
work." But "in what port=
ion of
Shakespeare's career would it be possible to point out that time could be f=
ound
for the interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of
practising lawyers? . . . It is beyond doubt that at an early period he was
called upon to abandon his attendance at school and assist his father, and =
was
soon after, at the age of sixteen, bound apprentice to a trade. While under the obligation of this bond=
he
could not have pursued any other employment.
Then he leaves Stratford and comes to London. He has to provide himself with the mean=
s of a
livelihood, and this he did in some capacity at the theatre. No one doubts that. The holding of horses is scouted by man=
y, and
perhaps with justice, as being unlikely and certainly unproved; but whatever
the nature of his employment was at the theatre, there is hardly room for t=
he
belief that it could have been other than continuous, for his progress there
was so rapid. Ere long he had been=
taken
into the company as an actor, and was soon spoken of as a 'Johannes
Factotum.' His rapid accumulation =
of wealth
speaks volumes for the constancy and activity of his services. One fails to=
see
when there could be a break in the current of his life at this period of it,
giving room or opportunity for legal or indeed any other employment. 'In 1589,' says Knight, 'we have undeni=
able
evidence that he had not only a casual engagement, was not only a salaried =
servant,
as many players were, but was a shareholder in the company of the Queen's
players with other shareholders below him on the list.' This (1589) would be within two years a=
fter
his arrival in London, which is placed by White and Halliwell-Phillipps abo=
ut
the year 1587. The difficulty in
supposing that, starting with a state of ignorance in 1587, when he is supp=
osed
to have come to London, he was induced to enter upon a course of most exten=
ded
study and mental culture, is almost insuperable. Still it was physically possible, provi=
ded
always that he could have had access to the needful books. But this legal training seems to me to =
stand
on a different footing. It is not =
only unaccountable
and incredible, but it is actually negatived by the known facts of his
career." Lord Penzance then r=
efers
to the fact that "by 1592 (according to the best authority, Mr. Grant
White) several of the plays had been written.
The Comedy of Errors in 1589, Love's Labour's Lost in 1589, Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1589 or 1590, and so forth," and=
then
asks, "with this catalogue of dramatic work on hand . . . was it possi=
ble
that he could have taken a leading part in the management and conduct of two
theatres, and if Mr. Phillipps is to be relied upon, taken his share in the
performances of the provincial tours of his company--and at the same time
devoted himself to the study of the law in all its branches so efficiently =
as
to make himself complete master of its principles and practice, and saturate
his mind with all its most technical terms?"
I have
cited this passage from Lord Penzance's book, because it lay before me, and=
I
had already quoted from it on the matter of Shakespeare's legal knowledge; =
but
other writers have still better set forth the insuperable difficulties, as =
they
seem to me, which beset the idea that Shakespeare might have found time in =
some
unknown period of early life, amid multifarious other occupations, for the
study of classics, literature and law, to say nothing of languages and a few
other matters. Lord Penzance furth=
er
asks his readers: "Did you ever meet with or hear of an instance in wh=
ich
a young man in this country gave himself up to legal studies and engaged in
legal employments, which is the only way of becoming familiar with the
technicalities of practice, unless with the view of practicing in that
profession? I do not believe that =
it would
be easy, or indeed possible, to produce an instance in which the law has be=
en
seriously studied in all its branches, except as a qualification for practi=
ce
in the legal profession."
* * * * *=
This
testimony is so strong, so direct, so authoritative; and so uncheapened,
unwatered by guesses, and surmises, and maybe-so's, and might-have-beens, a=
nd
could-have-beens, and must-have-beens, and the rest of that ton of plaster =
of
paris out of which the biographers have built the colossal brontosaur which
goes by the Stratford actor's name, that it quite convinces me that the man=
who
wrote Shakespeare's Works knew all about law and lawyers. Also, that that man could not have been=
the Stratford
Shakespeare--and wasn't .
Who
did write these Works, then?
I wish
I knew.
Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare's Wo=
rks?
Nobody
knows.
We
cannot say we know a thing when that thing has not been pro=
ved. Know <=
/span>is
too strong a word to use when the evidence is not final and absolutely
conclusive. We can infer, if we wa=
nt to,
like those slaves . . . No, I will not write that word, it is not kind, it =
is
not courteous. The upholders of the Stratford-Shakespeare superstition call=
us the hardest
names they can think of, and they keep doing it all the time; very well, if
they like to descend to that level, let them do it, but I will not so undig=
nify
myself as to follow them. I cannot=
call
them harsh names; the most I can do is to indicate them by terms reflecting=
my disapproval;
and this without malice, without venom.
To
resume. What I was about to say, w=
as,
those thugs have built their entire superstition upon inferences , not upon known and establis=
hed facts. It is a weak method, and poor, and I am=
glad
to be able to say our side never resorts to it while there is anything else=
to
resort to.
But
when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a place of that sort.
Since
the Stratford Shakespeare couldn't have written the Works, we infer that
somebody did. Who was it, then?
Ordinarily
when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent like a tidal wave, whose =
roar
and boom and thunder are made up of admiration, delight and applause, a doz=
en
obscure people rise up and claim the authorship. Why a dozen, instead of on=
ly
one or two? One reason is, because
there's a dozen that are recognizably competent to do that poem. Do you remember "Beautiful
Snow"? Do you remember "=
Rock
Me to Sleep, Mother, Rock Me to Sleep"?
Do you remember "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight=
! Make
me a child again just for to-night"?
I remember them very well. Their authorship was claimed by most of t=
he
grown-up people who were alive at the time, and every claimant had one
plausible argument in his favor, at least: to wit, he could have done the
authoring; he was competent.
Have
the Works been claimed by a dozen? They
haven't. There was good reason.
There
has been only one Shakespeare. The=
re
couldn't be two; certainly there couldn't be two at the same time. It takes ages to bring forth a Shakespe=
are,
and some more ages to match him. T=
his
one was not matched before his time; nor during his time; and hasn't been
matched since. The prospect of mat=
ching
him in our time is not bright.
The
Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not qualified to write t=
he
Works, and that Francis Bacon was. They
claim that Bacon possessed the stupendous equipment--both natural and
acquired--for the miracle; and that no other Englishman of his day possessed
the like; or, indeed, anything closely approaching it.
Macaulay,
in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor and horizonless magnitude =
of
that equipment. Also, he has synop=
sized
Bacon's history: a thing which cannot be done for the Stratford Shakespeare,
for he hasn't any history to synopsize.
Bacon's history is open to the world, from his boyhood to his death =
in
old age--a history consisting of known facts, displayed in minute and
multitudinous detail; facts , not =
guesses
and conjectures and might-have-beens.
Whereby
it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen, and had a Lord Chancell=
or
for his father, and a mother who was "distinguished both as a linguist=
and
a theologian: she corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewell, and translated =
his Apologia from the Latin so correctly that neither=
he
nor Archbishop Parker could suggest a single alteration." It is the atmosphere we are reared in t=
hat
determines how our inclinations and aspirations shall tend. The atmosphere furnished by the parents=
to the
son in this present case was an atmosphere saturated with learning; with
thinkings and ponderings upon deep subjects; and with polite culture. It had its natural effect. Shakespeare of Stratford was reared in a
house which had no use for books, since its owners, his parents, were witho=
ut
education. This may have had an ef=
fect
upon the son, but we do not know, because we have no history of him of an
informing sort. There were but few books anywhere, in that day, and only the
well-to-do and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to
the dead languages. "All the
valuable books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of Europe would
hardly have filled a single shelf"--imagine it! The few existing books were in the Latin
tongue mainly. "A person who =
was
ignorant of it was shut out from all acquaintance--not merely with Cicero a=
nd
Virgil, but with the most interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets =
of
his own time"--a literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for his
fictitious reputation's sake, since the writer of his Works would begin to =
use
it wholesale and in a most masterly way before the lad was hardly more than=
out
of his teens and into his twenties.
At
fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three years there. Thence he went to Paris in the train of=
the
English Ambassador, and there he mingled daily with the wise, the cultured,=
the
great, and the aristocracy of fashion, during another three years. A total of six years spent at the sourc=
es of
knowledge; knowledge both of books and of men.
The three spent at the university were coeval with the second and la=
st
three spent by the little Stratford lad at Stratford school supposedly, and
perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference--with nothing to infer from. The second three of the Baconian six we=
re
"presumably" spent by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a
butcher. That is, the thugs presume
it--on no evidence of any kind. Wh=
ich is
their way, when they want a historical fact.
Fact and presumption are, for business purposes, all the same to
them. They know the difference, bu=
t they
also know how to blink it. They kn=
ow,
too, that while in history-building a fact is better than a presumption, it
doesn't take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when they have the handling of it. They know by old experience that when t=
hey
get hold of a presumption-tadpole he is not going to stay tadpole in their history-tank; no, they =
know
how to develop him into the giant four-legged bullfrog of fact , and make him sit up on his hams, =
and
puff out his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-stay; and as=
sert
his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a thundering bellow that will conv=
ince
everybody because it is so loud. T=
he
thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons where reasoning convinc=
es
but one. I wouldn't be a thug, not=
even
if--but never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the argument, and =
it
is not noble in spirit besides. If=
I am
better than a thug, is the merit mine?
No, it is His. Then to Him =
be the
praise. That is the right spirit.<=
o:p>
They
"presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection with
the Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher. They also "presume" that the
butcher was his father. They don't
know. There is no written record o=
f it,
nor any other actual evidence. If =
it
would have helped their case any, they would have apprenticed him to thirty
butchers, to fifty butchers, to a wilderness of butchers--all by their pate=
nted
method "presumption." If=
it
will help their case they will do it yet; and if it will further help it, t=
hey
will "presume" that all those butchers were his father. And the week after, they will say it. =
span>Why,
it is just like being the past tense of the compound reflexive adverbial in=
candescent
hypodermic irregular accusative Noun of Multitude; which is father to the
expression which the grammarians call Verb.
It is like a whole ancestry, with only one posterity.
To
resume. Next, the young Bacon took=
up
the study of law, and mastered that abstruse science. From that day to the end of his life he=
was
daily in close contact with lawyers and judges; not as a casual onlooker in=
intervals
between holding horses in front of a theatre, but as a practicing lawyer--a
great and successful one, a renowned one, a Launcelot of the bar, the most
formidable lance in the high brotherhood of the legal Table Round; he lived=
in
the law's atmosphere thenceforth, all his years, and by sheer ability forced
his way up its difficult steeps to its supremest summit, the Lord
Chancellorship, leaving behind him no fellow craftsman qualified to challen=
ge
his divine right to that majestic place.
When
we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the other illustrious exp=
erts
upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses, brilliances, profundities and
felicities so prodigally displayed in the Plays, and try to fit them to the
history-less Stratford stage-manager, they sound wild, strange, incredible,
ludicrous; but when we put them in the mouth of Bacon they do not sound
strange, they seem in their natural and rightful place, they seem at home
there. Please turn back and read t=
hem
again. Attributed to Shakespeare of
Stratford they are meaningless, they are inebriate extravagancies--intemper=
ate
admirations of the dark side of the moon, so to speak; attributed to Bacon,
they are admirations of the golden glories of the moon's front side, the mo=
on
at the full--and not intemperate, not overwrought, but sane and right, and
justified. "At every turn and=
point
at which the author required a metaphor, simile or illustration, his mind e=
ver
turned first to the law; he seems almost to have thought in legal phrases; the commonest legal ph=
rases,
the commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of his pen." That could happen to no one but a person
whose trade was the law; it could not happen to a da=
bbler
in it. Veteran mariners fill their
conversation with sailor-phrases and draw all their similes from the ship a=
nd
the sea and the storm, but no mere passenger
ever does it, be he of Stratford or
elsewhere; or could do it with anything resembling accuracy, if he were har=
dy
enough to try. Please read again w=
hat
Lord Campbell and the other great authorities have said about Bacon when th=
ey
thought they were saying it about Shakespeare of Stratford.
The author of the Plays was equipped, be=
yond
every other man of his time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capacious=
ness
of mind, grace and majesty of expression.
Every one has said it, no one doubts it.
Also, he had humor, humor in rich abundance, and always wanting to b=
reak
out. We have no evidence of any kind that Shakespeare of Stratford possesse=
d any
of these gifts or any of these acquirements.
The only lines he ever wrote, so far as we know, are substantially
barren of them--barren of all of them.
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare <=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> To digg the dust encloased heare:
Ben
Jonson says of Bacon, as orator:
His language, where he could spare and pass by a jest =
, was
nobly censorious. No man ever spoke more neatly, more pre=
ssly,
more weightily, or suffered less
emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered.
No member of his speech but consisted of his (its) own graces . . . The fear of every man th=
at
heard him was lest he should ma=
ke an
end.
From
Macaulay:
He continued to distinguish himself in
Parliament, particularly by his
exertions in favor of one excellent measure on which the King's heart was set--the union of England a=
nd
Scotland. It was not difficult for such an intellect to di=
scover
many irresistible arguments in =
favor
of such a scheme. He conducted the=
great
case of the Post Nati in the Exchequer Chamber; and the decisi=
on of
the judges--a decision the lega=
lity
of which may be questioned, but the beneficial effect of which must be
acknowledged--was in a great me=
asure
attributed to his dexterous management.
Again:
While actively engaged in the House of
Commons and in the courts of la=
w, he
still found leisure for letters and philosophy.
The noble treatise on th=
e Advancement of Learning , which at a lat=
er
period was expanded into the De Augmentis , appeared in 1605.
The =
Wisdom
of the Ancients , a work which if it had proceeded from any other writer would have been cons=
idered
as a masterpiece of wit and lea=
rning,
was printed in 1609.
In the meantime the Novum Organum was slowly proceeding. Several distinguished men of learning had been
permitted to see portions of th=
at
extraordinary book, and they spoke with the greatest admiration of his genius.
Even Sir Thomas Bodley, after perusin=
g the Cogitata et Visa , one of the most precious of those scattered =
leaves
out of which the great oracular
volume was afterward made up, acknowledged that "in all proposals and plots in that book, Bac=
on
showed himself a master workman"; and that "it coul=
d not
be gainsaid but all the treatise over
did abound with choice conceits of the present state of learning, and with worthy contemplati=
ons of
the means to procure it."
In 1612 a new edition of the Essays appeared, with additions surpassing the original collection bo=
th in
bulk and quality.
Nor did these pursuits distract Bacon=
's
attention from a work the most
arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful that even his mighty powers could have achieved,
"the reducing and recompiling," to use his own phrase, "of the laws=
of
England."
To
serve the exacting and laborious offices of Attorney General and Solicitor
General would have satisfied the appetite of any other man for hard work, b=
ut
Bacon had to add the vast literary industries just described, to satisfy
his. He was a born worker.
The service which he rendered to lett=
ers
during the last five years of h=
is
life, amid ten thousand distractions and vexations, increase the regret with which we think on the=
many
years which he had wasted, to u=
se the
words of Sir Thomas Bodley, "on such study as was not worthy such a student."
He commenced a digest of the laws of
England, a History of England u=
nder
the Princes of the House of Tudor, a body of National History, a Philosophical Romance. He made extensive and valuable addition=
s to his Essays.
He published the inestimable Treatise
De Argumentis Scientiarum .
Did
these labors of Hercules fill up his time to his contentment, and quiet his
appetite for work? Not entirely:
The trifles with which he amused hims=
elf in
hours of pain and languor bore =
the
mark of his mind. The best jestbook in the world is that which he dictated from memory, without
referring to any book, on a day=
on
which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.
Here
are some scattered remarks (from Macaulay) which throw light upon Bacon, and
seem to indicate--and maybe demonstrate--that he was competent to write the
Plays and Poems:
With great minuteness of observation =
he had
an amplitude of comprehension s=
uch as
has never yet been vouchsafed to any other human being.
The "Essays" contain abunda=
nt
proofs that no nice feature of character, no peculiarity in the orde=
ring
of a house, a garden or a court-masque, could escape the notice=
of
one whose mind was capable of t=
aking
in the whole world of knowledge.
His understanding resembled the tent =
which
the fairy Paribanou gave to Pri=
nce
Ahmed: fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a lady; spread it, and the armies of powerful
Sultans might repose beneath its
shade.
The knowledge in which Bacon excelled=
all
men was a knowledge of the mutu=
al
relations of all departments of knowledge.
In a letter written when he was only
thirty-one, to his uncle, Lord Burleigh, he said, "I have taken=
all
knowledge to be my province."
Though Bacon did not arm his philosop=
hy
with the weapons of logic, he a=
dorned
her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric.
The practical faculty was powerful in
Bacon; but not, like his wit, so
powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason, and to tyrannize over the whole man.
There
are too many places in the Plays where this happens. Poor old dying John of Gaunt volleying
second-rate puns at his own name, is a pathetic instance of it. "We may assume" that it is Ba=
con's
fault, but the Stratford Shakespeare has to bear the blame.
No imagination was ever at once so st=
rong
and so thoroughly subjugated. It stopped at the first check from good
sense.
In truth much of Bacon's life was pas=
sed in
a visionary world--amid things =
as
strange as any that are described in the "Arabian Tales" . . . amid buildings more sumptuous tha=
n the
palace of Aladdin, fountains mo=
re
wonderful than the golden water of Parizade, conveyances more rapid than the hippo=
gryph
of Ruggiero, arms more formidab=
le
than the lance of Astolfo, remedies more efficacious than the balsam of Fierabras. Yet in his magnificent day-dreams there=
was nothing wild--nothing but what sober =
reason
sanctioned.
Bacon's greatest performance is the f=
irst
book of the Novum Organum . .
. Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit which is employed only to illustrate and decor=
ate
truth. No book ever made so great a revolution in the mode of thi=
nking,
overthrew so many prejudices,
introduced so many new opinions.
But what we most admire is the vast
capacity of that intellect which, without effort, takes in at once all =
the
domains of science--all the pas=
t, the
present and the future, all the errors of two thousand years, all the encouraging signs of t=
he
passing times, all the bright h=
opes
of the coming age.
He had a wonderful talent for packing
thought close and rendering it portable.
His eloquence would alone have entitl=
ed him
to a high rank in literature.
It is
evident that he had each and every one of the mental gifts and each and eve=
ry
one of the acquirements that are so prodigally displayed in the Plays and
Poems, and in much higher and richer degree than any other man of his time =
or
of any previous time. He was a gen=
ius
without a mate, a prodigy not matable.
There was only one of him; the planet could not produce two of him at
one birth, nor in one age. He coul=
d have
written anything that is in the Plays and Poems. He could have written this:
The cloud-cap'd towers, the gorgeous
palaces, The solemn temples, the
great globe itself, Yea, all wh=
ich it
inherit, shall dissolve, And, l=
ike an
insubstantial pageant faded, Le=
ave
not a rack behind. We are such stu=
ff As dreams are made on, and our little=
life Is rounded with a sleep.
Also,
he could have written this, but he refrained:
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare <=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> To digg the dust encloased heare:
When a
person reads the noble verses about the cloud-cap'd towers, he ought not to
follow it immediately with Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare, because he =
will
find the transition from great poetry to poor prose too violent for
comfort. It will give him a shock.=
You never notice how commonplace and un=
poetic
gravel is, until you bite into a layer of it in a pie.
Am I trying to convince anybody that
Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare's Works?
Ah, now, what do you take me for?
Would I be so soft as that, after having known the human race famili=
arly
for nearly seventy-four years? It =
would
grieve me to know that any one could think so injuriously of me, so
uncomplimentarily, so unadmiringly of me. No-no, I am aware that when even =
the
brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a
superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its
maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any
evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the vali=
dity
of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself. We always get at second hand our notions
about systems of government; and high-tariff and low-tariff; and prohibition
and anti-prohibition; and the holiness of peace and the glories of war; and
codes of honor and codes of morals; and approval of the duel and disapprova=
l of
it; and our beliefs concerning the nature of cats; and our ideas as to whet=
her
the murder of helpless wild animals is base or is heroic; and our preferenc=
es
in the matter of religious and political parties; and our acceptance or
rejection of the Shakespeares and the Arthur Ortons and the Mrs. Eddys. We get them all at second-hand, we reas=
on
none of them out for ourselves. It=
is
the way we are made. It is the way=
we
are all made, and we can't help it, we can't change it. And whenever we have been furnished a f=
etish,
and have been taught to believe in it, and love it and worship it, and refr=
ain
from examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear and strong, that c=
an persuade
us to withdraw from it our loyalty and our devotion. In morals, conduct, and beliefs we take=
the
color of our environment and associations, and it is a color that can safel=
y be
warranted to wash. Whenever we have been furnished with a tar baby ostensib=
ly
stuffed with jewels, and warned that it will be dishonorable and irreverent=
to disembowel
it and test the jewels, we keep our sacrilegious hands off it. We submit, n=
ot
reluctantly, but rather gladly, for we are privately afraid we should find,
upon examination, that the jewels are of the sort that are manufactured at
North Adams, Mass.
I
haven't any idea that Shakespeare will have to vacate his pedestal this sid=
e of
the year 2209. Disbelief in him ca=
nnot
come swiftly, disbelief in a healthy and deeply-loved tar baby has never be=
en
known to disintegrate swiftly, it is a very slow process. It took several thousand years to convi=
nce
our fine race--including every splendid intellect in it--that there is no s=
uch
thing as a witch; it has taken several thousand years to convince that same
fine race--including every splendid intellect in it--that there is no such
person as Satan; it has taken several centuries to remove perdition from the
Protestant Church's program of postmortem entertainments; it has taken a we=
ary
long time to persuade American Presbyterians to give up infant damnation and
try to bear it the best they can; and it looks as if their Scotch brethren =
will
still be burning babies in the everlasting fires when Shakespeare comes down
from his perch.
We are
The Reasoning Race. We can't prove=
it by
the above examples, and we can't prove it by the miraculous
"histories" built by those Stratfordolaters out of a hatful of ra=
gs
and a barrel of sawdust, but there is a plenty of other things we can prove=
it
by, if I could think of them. We a=
re The
Reasoning Race, and when we find a vague file of chipmunk-tracks stringing
through the dust of Stratford village, we know by our reasoning powers that
Hercules has been along there. I f=
eel
that our fetish is safe for three centuries yet. The bust, too--there in the Stratford
Church. The precious bust, the pri=
celess
bust, the calm bust, the serene bust, the emotionless bust, with the dandy
moustache, and the putty face, unseamed of care--that face which has looked
passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty years and =
will
still look down upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more, with the deep, de=
ep, deep,
subtle, subtle, subtle, expression of a bladder.
One of the most trying defects which I f=
ind in
these--these--what shall I call them? for I will not apply injurious epithe=
ts
to them, the way they do to us, such violations of courtesy being repugnant=
to
my nature and my dignity. The furt=
hest I
can go in that direction is to call them by names of limited reverence--nam=
es
merely descriptive, never unkind, never offensive, never tainted by harsh
feeling. If they would do like this, they would feel bett=
er in
their hearts. Very well, then--to
proceed. One of the most trying defects which I find in these Stratfordolat=
ers,
these Shakesperoids, these thugs, these bangalores, these troglodytes, these
herumfrodites, these blatherskites, these buccaneers, these bandoleers, is
their spirit of irreverence. It is
detectable in every utterance of theirs when they are talking about us. I am thankful that in me there is nothi=
ng of
that spirit. When a thing is sacre=
d to
me it is impossible for me to be irreverent toward it. I cannot call to mind a single instance=
where
I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to
other people. Am I in the right? I think so.
But I ask no one to take my unsupported word; no, look at the dictio=
nary;
let the dictionary decide. Here is=
the definition:
Irreverence
. The quality or condition of
irreverence toward God and sacr=
ed
things.
What
does the Hindu say? He says it is
correct. He says irreverence is la=
ck of
respect for Vishnu, and Brahma, and Chrishna, and his other gods, and for h=
is
sacred cattle, and for his temples and the things within them. He endorses the definition, you see; and
there are 300,000,000 Hindus or their equivalents back of him.
The
dictionary had the acute idea that by using the capital G it could restrict
irreverence to lack of reverence for our
Deity and our sacred things, but t=
hat
ingenious and rather sly idea miscarried: for by the simple process of spel=
ling
his deities with capitals the Hindu confisca=
tes
the definition and restricts it to his own sects, thus making it clearly
compulsory upon us to revere his <=
span
style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> gods and his sacred things, and nobody's else. We can't say a word, for he has our own=
dictionary
at his back, and its decision is final.
This
law, reduced to its simplest terms, is this: 1.
Whatever is sacred to the Christian must be held in reverence by
everybody else; 2, whatever is sacred to the Hindu must be held in reverenc=
e by
everybody else; 3, therefore, by consequence, logically, and indisputably,
whatever is sacred to me must be held in reverence by everybody e=
lse.
Now
then, what aggravates me is, that these troglodytes and muscovites and
bandoleers and buccaneers are also=
trying to crowd in and share the benefit=
of
the law, and compel everybody to revere their Shakespeare and hold him
sacred. We can't have that: there's
enough of us already. If you go on
widening and spreading and inflating the privilege, it will presently come =
to
be conceded that each man's sacred things are the only ones, and the rest of the human race wil=
l have
to be humbly reverent toward them or suffer for it. That can surely happen, and when it hap=
pens,
the word Irreverence will be regarded as the most meaningless, and foolish,=
and
self-conceited, and insolent, and impudent and dictatorial word in the
language. And people will say,
"Whose business is it, what gods I worship and what things hold
sacred? Who has the right to dicta=
te to
my conscience, and where did he get that right?"
We
cannot afford to let that calamity come upon us. We must save the word from this
destruction. There is but one way =
to do
it, and that is, to stop the spread of the privilege, and strictly confine =
it
to its present limits: that is, to all the Christian sects, to all the Hind=
u sects,
and me. We do not need any more, t=
he
stock is watered enough, just as it is.
It
would be better if the privilege were limited to me alone. I think so because I am the only sect t=
hat
knows how to employ it gently, kindly, charitably, dispassionately. The other sects lack the quality of sel=
f-restraint. The Catholic Church says the most irrev=
erent
things about matters which are sacred to the Protestants, and the Protestan=
t Church
retorts in kind about the confessional and other matters which Catholics ho=
ld
sacred; then both of these irreverencers turn upon Thomas Paine and charge =
him with irreverence. This is all unfortunate, because it mak=
es it
difficult for students equipped with only a low grade of mentality to find =
out
what Irreverence really is .
It
will surely be much better all around if the privilege of regulating the
irreverent and keeping them in order shall eventually be withdrawn from all=
the
sects but me. Then there will be n=
o more
quarrelling, no more bandying of disrespectful epithets, no more heart
burnings.
There will
then be nothing sacred involved in this Bacon-Shakespeare controversy except
what is sacred to me. That will si=
mplify
the whole matter, and trouble will cease.
There will be irreverence no longer, because I will not allow it.
Isn't it odd, when you think of it: that=
you
may list all the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern
times, clear back to the first Tudors--a list containing five hundred names,
shall we say?--and you can go to the histories, biographies and cyclopedias=
and
learn the particulars of the lives of every one of them. Every one of them except one--the most
famous, the most renowned--by far the most illustrious of them
all--Shakespeare! You can get the
details of the lives of all the celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all t=
he
celebrated tragedians, comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges, lawyer=
s,
poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, editors, inventors, reformers,
statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers, prize-fighters, murderers, pira=
tes,
conspirators, horse-jockeys, bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers,
adventurers by land and sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists,
Claimants, impostors, chemists, biologists, geologists, philologists, colle=
ge
presidents and professors, architects, engineers, painters, sculptors,
politicians, agitators, rebels, revolutionists, patriots, demagogues, clown=
s,
cooks, freaks, philosophers, burglars, highwaymen, journalists, physicians,
surgeons--you can get the life-histories of all of them but one .
Just one--the most extraordinary and the most celebrated of them
all--Shakespeare!
You
may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons furnished by the rest of
Christendom in the past four centuries, and you can find out the life-histo=
ries
of all those people, too. You will=
then
have listed 1500 celebrities, and you can trace the authentic life-historie=
s of
the whole of them. Save one--far a=
nd away
the most colossal prodigy of the entire accumulation--Shakespeare! About him you can find out nothing . Nothing of even the slightest
importance. Nothing worth the trou=
ble of
stowing away in your memory. Nothi=
ng
that even remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinct=
ly
common-place person--a manager, an actor of inferior grade, a small trader =
in a
small village that did not regard him as a person of any consequence, and h=
ad
forgotten all about him before he was fairly cold in his grave. We can go to the records and find out t=
he
life-history of every renowned rac=
e-horse
of modern times--but not
Shakespeare's! There are many reas=
ons
why, and they have been furnished in cartloads (of guess and conjecture) by
those troglodytes; but there is one that is worth all the rest of the reaso=
ns put
together, and is abundantly sufficient all by itself-- he hadn't any histor=
y to
record . There is no way of getting
around that deadly fact. And no sane way has yet been discovered of getting=
around
its formidable significance.
Its
quite plain significance--to any but those thugs (I do not use the term
unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence while he lived, and none u=
ntil
he had been dead two or three generations.
The Plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and if he wrote them=
it
seems a pity the world did not find it out.
He ought to have explained that he was the author, and not merely a =
nom de plume for another man to hide behind. If he ha=
d been
less intemperately solicitous about his bones, and more solicitous about his
Works, it would have been better for his good name, and a kindness to us. The bones were not important. They will moulder away, they will turn =
to
dust, but the Works will endure until the last sun goes down.
=
MARK TWAIN.
P.S. March 25.
About two months ago I was illuminating this Autobiography with some
notions of mine concerning the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, and I then to=
ok
occasion to air the opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of =
no
public consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was utterly obscure
and unimportant. And not only in g=
reat
London, but also in the little village where he was born, where he lived a
quarter of a century, and where he died and was buried. I argued that if he=
had
been a person of any note at all, aged villagers would have had much to tell
about him many and many a year after his death, instead of being unable to
furnish inquirers a single fact connected with him. I believed, and I still believe, that i=
f he
had been famous, his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine has lasted=
in
my native village out in Missouri. It is
a good argument, a prodigiously strong one, and a most formidable one for e=
ven
the most gifted, and ingenious, and plausible Stratfordolater to get around=
or
explain away. To-day a Hannibal Co=
urier-Post
of recent date has reached me, wit=
h an article
in it which reinforces my contention that a really celebrated person cannot=
be
forgotten in his village in the short space of sixty years. I will make an extract from it:
Hannibal, as a city, may have many si=
ns to
answer for, but ingratitude is =
not
one of them, or reverence for the great men she has produced, and as the years go by =
her
greatest son Mark Twain, or S. =
L.
Clemens as a few of the unlettered call him, grows in the estimation and regard of the resident=
s of
the town he made famous and the=
town
that made him famous. His name is
associated with every old build=
ing
that is torn down to make way for the modern structures demanded by a rapidly growing city, a=
nd
with every hill or cave over or
through which he might by any possibility have roamed, while the many points of interest which he wove=
into
his stories, such as Holiday Hi=
ll,
Jackson's Island, or Mark Twain Cave, are now monuments to his genius. Hannibal is glad of any opportunity to =
do him
honor as he has honored her.
So it has happened that the "old=
timers"
who went to school with Mark or=
were
with him on some of his usual escapades have been honored with large audiences whenever they we=
re in
a reminiscent mood and condesce=
nded
to tell of their intimacy with the ordinary boy who came to be a very extraordinary humorist a=
nd
whose every boyish act is now s=
een to
have been indicative of what was to come.
Like Aunt Beckey and Mrs.
Clemens, they can now see that Mark was hardly appreciated when he lived here and that the thing=
s he
did as a boy and was whipped for
doing were not all bad after all. =
So
they have been in no hesitancy =
about
drawing out the bad things he did as well as the good in their efforts to get a "=
Mark
Twain story," all incidents being viewed in the light of his pres=
ent
fame, until the volume of "Twainiana" is already
considerable and growing in proportion as the "old timers" drop away and =
the
stories are retold second and third hand by their descendants. With some seventy-three years young and=
living in a villa instead of a house =
he is
a fair target, and let him incorporate, copyright, or patent him=
self
as he will, there are some of h=
is
"works" that will go swooping up Hannibal chimneys as long as
The
Mrs. Clemens referred to is my mother-- was my mother.
And
here is another extract from a Hannibal paper.
Of date twenty days ago:
Miss Becca Blankenship died at the ho=
me of
William Dickason, 408 Rock Stre=
et, at
2.30 o'clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72 years. The deceased was a sister of "Huckle=
berry
Finn," one of the famous characters in Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer .
She had been a member of the
Dickason family--the housekeeper--for nearly forty-five years, and was a highly respected lady. For the past eight years she had been an invalid, but was as well care=
d for
by Mr. Dickason and his family =
as if
she had been a near relative. She =
was a
member of the Park Methodist Ch=
urch
and a Christian woman.
I
remember her well. I have a pictur=
e of
her in my mind which was graven there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-thr=
ee
years ago. She was at that time ni=
ne
years old, and I was about eleven. I
remember where she stood, and how she looked; and I can still see her bare
feet, her bare head, her brown face, and her short tow-linen frock. She was crying. What it was about, I have long ago
forgotten. But it was the tears th=
at
preserved the picture for me, no doubt.
She was a good child, I can say that for her. She knew me nearly seventy years ago. Did she forget me, in the course of
time? I think not. If she had lived in Stratford in Shakes=
peare's
time, would she have forgotten him?
Yes. For he was never famous
during his lifetime, he was utterly obscure in Stratford, and there wouldn'=
t be
any occasion to remember him after he had been dead a week.
"Injun
Joe," "Jimmy Finn," and "General Gaines" were
prominent and very intemperate ne'er-do-weels in Hannibal two generations
ago. Plenty of gray-heads there re=
member
them to this day, and can tell you about them. Isn't it curious that two
"town-drunkards" and one half-breed loafer should leave behind th=
em,
in a remote Missourian village, a fame a hundred times greater and several
hundred times more particularized in the matter of definite facts than
Shakespeare left behind him in the village where he had lived the half of h=
is
lifetime?
<=
/span> MARK TWAIN.
Footnotes:
{1}
Four fathoms--twenty-four feet.
{2} From chapter XIII of "The Shakespe=
are
Problem Restated."